ELSBERRY Cardoza, Temple overwhelmed by UConn machine

Published 12:59 am, Wednesday, March 24, 2010

NORFOLK, Va. -- As Temple head coach Tonya Cardoza walked slowly past the UConn bench a few seconds after the first-half horn had sounded at the Ted Constant Convocation Center, all she could do was shake her head and smile in amazement.

Cardoza, the former UConn assistant coach, had just walked into a buzz saw and there was no escape, for her or her team. UConn had exploded out of the gates and blasted the wide-eyed Owls.

Geno Auriemma plays no favorites. It doesn't matter if the margin is five or 50 or 500. His job here, especially in the NCAA tournament, is to win. Nothing else.

And if that means blowing a good friend's team out of the water, so be it.

Huskies associate head coach Chris Dailey said something as Cardoza walked past toward her locker room, and Cardoza nodded in agreement. She's not the first to experience the unbelievable intensity that makes up the UConn machine. It's just that she never expected it could be this bad.

Not 90-36.

"Obviously, that's not the way we intended to come out. They jumped on us right from the start," Cardoza said. "And because we have difficulty scoring, it was pretty tough to even put up a good fight."

Fight? If this had been a fight, it would have been stopped within the first minute. Five minutes in, Temple was down 10. Five minutes later, the Owls were down 25.

Five minutes after that, UConn was leading by 35. The halftime lead was 43.

Yeah, it was that dominating.

There was nothing Cardoza could do. Call timeout? That didn't work. Slow the tempo down and work the shot clock? Sorry. The Huskies could do no wrong and Temple could do no right.

"I said to someone at one point, `When we're playing like this, it's impossible to beat us and I don't know what you do in that situation.' I mean, forget Tonya and the fact that she's got a young team. I mean, any team, forget how many times they've been to the tournament, would have had a hard time competing with us."

This was perhaps the greatest half of basketball that the Huskies have played, possibly ever. They shot 77.8 percent in the first half and held Temple to just 5 of 32 (15.6 percent). They made 7-of-9 shots from behind the 3-point arc and completely took the life out of the Owls players.

It left Cardoza, who has seen a lot of these kind of halves during her time at UConn, nearly speechless.

"Wow," she said when asked her thoughts after that opening 20-minute salvo that had Temple trailing 55-12. "Watching them on film, we're trying to figure out how we're going to guard all these guys. They're such a great passing team and they showed that and walking off the court, it was just like, `Wow.' They're that good. Watching them in person is something totally different and it's from one through 12. Their guys coming off the bench can beat a lot of teams."

And they did. With 14:48 left, Auriemma pretty much called off the dogs. He subbed out all five starters with the Huskies leading 68-20. And over that final stretch, UConn's second team outscored Temple's starters 22-13.

"It's kind of a tough thing to do sometimes, because these days, you tend to have a friend on every team you play against and you have to put that aside," Maya Moore said. "It's not personal. It's kind of like coming in as a player and having coach yell at you and you have to realize that it's not personal, that he's trying to do his job. I'm sure she understands that and when the horn sounds, we can hug each other."

But still, there were moments when Auriemma was watching his amazing team roll to consecutive win No. 74 when he tried to sneak a glance down the sidelines at his former assistant.

"It's a little tough. You don't know where to draw the line ... what are you going to do? Stop making every shot because your friend's on the other sideline?" Auriemma said. "We're not out here to embarrass anybody and we're not out here to make anybody look bad. We have better players than you, it's not your fault, it is what it is."

Besides, Auriemma's been on the other side of it, too. Maybe not within the last decade, but as a young coach just starting out in Storrs, he was given more than his share of beatdowns.

"One of my first years in the Big East, we were playing Villanova and I remember we were down 20 or 22 in the first half. We couldn't get the ball inbounds," he said. "They were pressing us and the coach (Harry Perretta) on the other side is a good friend of mine and finally, I just stood up and looked at him and went, `Hey, Harry ¦ stop pressing. We have no intention of winning this game, trust me.' And he just started laughing and he stopped pressing and everybody lived happily ever after. I understand. I've been there."